Before installing Lion, I could use the "double finger left/right swipe" gesture to go back and forward in the history in Google Chrome.

After installing Lion, I can't find any mouse gesture that implements this.

The new version of Safari uses a single finger swipe to go back and forward in history. Is there any way to emulate this in Chrome? Or, failing that, is there any other gesture for back/forward in Chrome?

To whoever down voted me, I miss read the question the first time I answered and edited to my answer. Clearly it has helped a few people so I am leaving it up. So next time please at least comment if you are going to down vote.
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Steve MoserJul 20 '11 at 20:30

You can set it to both 3 and 2 fingers so when apps become compatible you can use 2 fingers for them.
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Jonathan.Jul 24 '11 at 1:53

As of a late v16 version of the browser, Chrome now honors the preference of single-finger swipe to navigate back and forth. I am unsure of exact version numbers, however, in the v16 series after this feature was implemented, it was shortly followed up by an arrow that will float over the page and drift left or right, pointing either back or forward, and when that arrow is dragged over at least half the page, it is fully opaque and will actually cause the desired navigation to appear.

In either v17 or v18, that changed so that a small quarter circle with an arrow on the edge pops out from the relevant side of the page (left = back, right = forward), and when it stops animating any further out from the page edge you can lift your finger in order to cause the desired navigation to occur. If you don't wish to navigate back/forward, simply scroll horizontally in the opposite direction and collapse the arrow/pop-over.

I could not find a way to make it work with core utilities but I found a way to make it work with BetterTouchTool. First of all, disable three finger scrolling in the system preferences and then download and install BetterTouchTool, open its preferences and add the following settings for the Magic Mouse or Trackpad:

I found this whole thing quite frustrating too. I have used magic prefs for some time, and it seems that under OSX Lion, they have actually removed the system wide forward and back buttons, however: ⌘+[ and ⌘+] will do forward and back respectively in my experience pretty much system wide.

Magic Prefs: bind the gestures so that two finger swipe is the keyboard shortcut, and if you set it to three finger swipe to switch spaces it does the whole left right iOS style thing they have done with Lion.
http://www.ivoryhaze.com/temp/magicprefs.png

This is tried and tested working for me this morning, and i can actually carry on with my work now. - Good luck, i am sure it will work for you too.

( ps. magic prefs is a free preference pane app which is available from a google search i would post the link, but im all out of my allowed hyperlinks for this post!)

Felt your pain! I have Magic Mouse. Took me a few days to figure out what I think power users feel is right balance:

change mouse prefs to "swipe with one or two fingers" (to restore system-wide back/forward gesture metaphor to Chrome, Finder, etc)

you lose system-wide Spaces back/forward when you do this, but just hold down Option key with two-finger swipe to get it back (without having to lift right hand from mouse (as required for [ and ] shortcuts)